~ Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture & Department of Biology

Category Archives: In the news

Congratulations to Cooper for the award his poster Hybridization and Gene Flow Between Migratory and Non-Migratory Avian Species won at EVO-WIBO (Evolution in Washington, Idaho, British Columbia, and Oregon). His poster was based on his research using ddRADseq data to look at hybridization and gene flow in Towhees.

The Klicka Lab fully supports the conclusions of Rocha et al. (2014) and the merits of specimen collecting for natural history museums. The 100+ coauthors of this paper represent more than 60 research institutions on six continents. As stated by Rocha et al., “Halting collection of voucher specimens by scientists would be detrimental not only to our understanding of Earth’s diverse biota and its biological processes, but also for conservation and management efforts.”

Our recent paper published in Ecology Letters was recommended by the Faculty of 1000 as an important paper in ecology. In our study, we compared latitudinal range patterns between families of New World vertebrates that had ancestral geographic origins in North and South America. We found that families that originated in South America exhibited strong niche conservatism and were largely restricted to the Neotropical region. In contrast, families that originated in North America were more widely distributed across the Nearctic and Neotropical regions. We suggest that this asymmetry in niche conservatism has influenced biodiversity patterns in the New World, and is one of the underlying causes of the latitudinal biodiversity gradient.